Herein, related art is described to facilitate understanding of the invention. Related art labeled “prior art”, if any, is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
Databases and many other applications can require access to large quantities of data. Better performance can be achieved by keeping more of the data in relatively fast memory (which is typically solid-state dynamic random-access memory or “RAM”) rather than on relative slow but more capacious hard disks. When the amount of data needed for fast access exceeds the amount of available main memory, paging can be used to swap memory between main memory and disk storage. However, paged memory schemes suffer a performance hit with each page swap. To minimize or avoid such page swapping, processors with increased addressing capabilities (e.g., 64-bit addressing as opposed to 32-bit addressing) have been developed along with operating systems that can handle more system memory, which reduces both the amount of paging from disk and the associated performance penalties.